Steven Appleby , (born 27 January 1956), is an absurdist cartoonist, illustrator and artist living in Britain. She is a dual citizen of the UK and Canada. Her humour has been described as “observational or absurd, with a keen sense of the turmoil of fear and obsession that teems beneath the respectable exterior of most of us.”
Her work first appeared in the New Musical Express in 1984 with the Rockets Passing Overhead comic strip about the character Captain Star, which also appeared in The Observer, Zeit Magazin (Germany), as well as other newspapers and comics in the UK, Europe and America. Other comic strips followed in many publications including The Times, the Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian. Appleby’s work has also appeared on album covers, most notably Trompe le Monde by the Pixies.
Her comic strip Steven Appleby's Normal Life was translated into German and published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and also made into a radio series for BBC Radio 4. An earlier comic strip, Small Birds Singing, ran for eight years in The Times.
Appleby has also had numerous exhibitions of drawings & paintings, written and drawn many books, and collaborated on a musical play, Crocs In Frocks.
Early life
The oldest of four children, Steven Appleby was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1956 and grew up in Wooler, near the Scottish border.
Appleby recalls a childhood spent making camps, climbing trees, and hoisting flags outdoors, and reading books such as Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. The worlds of cartoonists such as Ronald Searle (St Trinian’s) and Charles Addams (The Addams Family), found on her parents’ bookshelves, also made an impression on her as a child.
In an interview with The Guardian, Appleby describes her mother, Ibbie, as coming ‘... from Canada, a distant land of snow and french toast, far away across the sea, where she skated and skied in the day and danced to big bands by night.’ Towards the end of the Second World War, having fallen in love with Steven’s father, Walter, she came to Britain on a convoy. ‘She travelled alone to live with my father’s family in a tiny village on the coast of north Northumberland while he was still away flying planes in Burma. Together, after the war, they bred boxer dogs, performed with the village amateur dramatic society and laughed at The Goon Show on the wireless.’
Appleby attended Wooler Church of England Primary School, where she won prizes for Plasticine modelling until, aged eleven, she was sent to Bootham School, York, as a boarder, where she pursued her interests in music and art. She played keyboards in school bands and, inspired by Jesus Christ Superstar, wrote and performed (with Nick Battey) Inwards & Outwards, a rock cantata.
After school, in 1974, she took a foundation course in art & design at Manchester Polytechnic, followed by one term on the BA graphic design course (with Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville) after which she dropped out to play with school friends in a band called Ploog, which was influenced by prog rock and complicated pop that she has described as ‘far beyond their playing capabilities.’ In 1977 Appleby returned to art education. She studied graphic design at Newcastle Polytechnic (1978–1981), then illustration at the Royal College of Art (1981–1984), where her tutor was Quentin Blake. She has lived in London since 1981.
Career
While at the RCA, Appleby met writer George Mole. The two collaborated on a number of projects, including their first book, No, Honestly, I Couldn’t Eat Another Mouthful (1984), various cartoon spreads for Punch (Daily Life On Other Planets, Lost Cars), The Observer (Home Economics in the Nineties), The Oldie, and a further three books.
Beginning while she was at the RCA, Appleby worked for her friend and fellow Manchester art school alumnus Malcolm Garrett, who had been commissioned by editor Kasper de Graaf to design a monthly music, art and fashion magazine (New Sounds New Styles). After graduation, Appleby continued to assist Garrett at his company Assorted Images; she worked on book design (When Cameras Go Crazy, More Dark Than Shark), and record sleeves, particularly for Duran Duran. His work on designs for Duran Duran merchandising gave Appleby ideas which would eventually feed into the world of Captain Star, when she was invited by the New Musical Express to submit an idea for a cartoon strip.